When a writer writes about a house, he doesn’t just write about a house. A house, along with its stone and mortar, embodies how its builder assesses himself, how he wants others to perceive him, and how well he actually stands. It’s the erection of an ideal, and the resulting scars as it is put to test over time. We know this from the tower of Babel, from Hearst Castle, from Gatsby’s mansion on West Egg. A house is, as Anthony Shadid states in House of Stone, “a reflection of ourselves or what we wanted ourselves to be.”

Of what Shadid has made of his life, we know this much: he wrote as a foreign correspondent for the New YorkTimes and the WashingtonPost, and twice earned a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage in Iraq. Twice, he has avoided death: once when shot by an Israeli sniper while covering the Israeli-Palsteinian conflict; and the second while covering the uprising in Libya, where he was kidnapped and beaten for a week by Colonel Qaddafi’s officers. Last February, he passed away while covering the Free Syrian Army in Syria. House of Stone was the last book he wrote before he died.

In House of Stone, Shadid mostly writes about the house his great grandfather Isber built in Marjayoun, a town in southern Lebanon near the Israeli border. The house was large, ostentatious, and built on a hilltop. Furnished with imported tiles from Marseilles and large limestone arches, the house formed the backdrop for a man of newly acquired wealth. Over the last century, the house in Marjayoun witnessed the fall of the Ottoman empire, two world wars, the decades-long civil war, and most recently the 2006 war with Israel, responsible for blowing off a part of the top floor of Shadid’s family house. Meanwhile, generations of Shadid’s ancestors were born into that house, and fleeing for America, abandoning the house to its war-torn demise. It wasn’t until 2007 when Shadid had decided to return to rebuild that house.

Shadid documents the building of his house in thoughtful, elegiac vignettes throughout the book. Interspersed are historical narratives of Lebanon, and his family’s diaspora through France and the United States. All of this is embodied by the architecture of the house, which brings to mind the religious and ethnic diversity of the town in which it stands. With each cemento tile comes a burdened history of colonization; with each erected archway comes the memory of a rich, bygone Levant. By the book’s end, the duet comes to a climax as the completion of Shadid’s house is juxtaposed with scenes of its plundering and destruction during the civil war.

The delicacy of Shadid’s book, however, shines in how he writes as personally as he does politically. Just as Lebanon finds him after its war with Israel, Shadid returns from a domestic war of his own: a divorce. Keep in mind that Shadid’s Marjayoun is far from Didion’s Honolulu. He writes, “Perhaps because I had been so long discontented with the world around me, I increasingly turned my attention to Isber’s world, which, while simpler, was no less tumultuous than my own.”

At the start of the book, Shadid arrives in Marjayoun after having lost his spouse, his daughter, and most poignantly, his sense of identity. After three years of covering the conflict in Iraq, he returns to a landscape as torn as himself.

In rebuilding his family’s house, Shadid draws several comparisons between his great grandfather Isber and himself, the most searing of which is their luck in “cheating death.” During World War I, Isber was arrested and sentenced to death for avoiding a military draft. He only survived after Isber’s brother bribed off the executioner with the family’s savings. This echoes in the final chapter of the book, when Shadid details his own bargains with death at being held at gunpoint by a Libyan officer, just last year.

Describing the sense of waiting to die, whether held at gunpoint or getting handcuffed and beaten in a basement cell, Shadid writes that it felt like, “emptiness, aridity, hopelessness, the antithesis of creation, imagination.” Nearly every sentence in the book is weighed with that very feeling.

House of Stone is ultimately a search for identity disguised as a book about interior design. Admittedly, this book can be a trying read for those who don’t know how to read it. But even without any prior knowledge to Shadid’s biography or Lebanon‘s fraught history, House of Stone is a moving portrait of the human heart, and its resilience against wars and changing empires. Interspersed throughout the narrative are searing moments that cut universally. On displacement and diaspora, Shadid writes, “I worried that my solitude was the legacy of families forever doomed to departures.” Whether in Marjayoun, or in New York City, lines like these will always ring true.

If you’ve ever considered yourself a non-creative, Jonah Lehrer’s latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, will convince you otherwise. The author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist and How We Decide argues against the popular idea that creativity is a peculiar and separate form of cognition reserved for artists and inventors. Rather, the human mind has a built-in creative operating system that ushers the brain to continually form new and unexpected thoughts that have potential for creative breakthroughs.

The book opens with a fascinating account on the inner workings of Continuum, a design firm based in Boston, Massachusetts, who is approached by Proctor and Gamble with a desperate–yet seemingly simple–problem! They need a new floor cleaner.

To begin, Harry West, a leader on Continuum’s creative team, watches numerous reels of people cleaning. He waits and waits for the big eureka, but nothing illuminates. Suddenly, a spectacular thing happens after he watches someone sweep up coffee grounds with a wet piece of cloth. West has seen this clip before, but this time, he has an“aha!” moment…and it is followed by the birth of Swiffer.

What happened?

As Lehrer points out, West mentally removed himself from the problem and began observing the action as if he were an outsider watching for the very first time. Lehrer calls this the “anthropologist phase.” The German philosopher Martin Heidegger refers to this as “the unconcealing process”: The necessary persistence of meeting a dead end and finding new ways around it.

We can do the same by cutting away excess thoughts and distractions to unclutter the mind. Lehrer suggests that traveling and getting away from places we spend most of our time is actually essential for creativity. When we are physically near the problem, our thoughts become bound by a more limited set of associations, inhibiting the imagination to think of unconventional answers.

A study in the workplace also reveals that highest performing employees of most companies are the ones that consistently join in on conversations and interact with others. Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern University studying group creativity and interaction, agrees: “If I had to choose between a trader who was a little smarter or one who was a little better connected, I’d definitely go for the connections. Those conversations count for a lot.”

By now, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes has gained itself a reputation for being the novel you must read twice. I read it twice, and so did the director of last year’s Man Booker Prize, which Barnes’ novel won to no surprise. The book’s plot reads like that of a thriller paperback: full of vengeful ex-girlfriends, youth suicide and illicit sex–though it’s Barnes’ masochistically lyrical insights on loss and memory that drives this novel’s recruiting fan base to keep flipping back the pages.

The book centers on Tony Webster, an Englishman in his sixties, who is unexpectedly bequeathed the diary of Adrian, his childhood friend who had committed suicide forty years earlier. The will is from the late mother of his collegiate ex-girlfriend Veronica. Last he heard from her, she had ditched Tony for Adrian, and was presumably still Adrian’s girlfriend around the time his body was found behind a locked door, bled to death in a bathtub.

Why does Veronica’s mother have Adrian’s diary? And why did she want Tony, of all people, to have it? Tony suddenly finds himself mining his memory to find answers surrounding Adrian’s enigmatic suicide. His search lyrically reveals the weakness of memory as corroboration. These moments, rather than the book’s muscular plot, are where Barnes’ prose is strongest.

“I don’t envy Adrian his death, but I envy him the clarity of his life,” Tony muses in old age. “When you are in your twenties…you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.”

With the patina of hindsight, Tony’s recollection of Adrian reveal memory to be a fractious, fictitious thing, rather than the empirical recount of history in his schoolboy textbooks. What purpose does memory serve outside of corroboration? How does it mold and twist fiction with fact?

In addressing these questions, Barnes’ voice is potently enigmatic when objective details are purposely left out. He spares on physical details as if to shy away from the hard facts that memory can’t provide. The only physical detail we get about any of Tony’s lovers is the way they wear their hair. Dialogue and gossip instead form the basis of what Tony remembers, which makes nearly every conversation doubly interpreted. As Tony says later in life, “All my ‘conclusions’ are reversible.”

Here’s a particularly troublesome scene: in college, Tony asks Veronica why they didn’t have sex until after they broke up. She responds, “I don’t have to answer your questions anymore.” We can either imagine this the way Tony interprets it: spoken by a curt girl from Britain’s fashionable classes, who dismisses her inferior boyfriend as nothing more than a stepping stone to his smarter, elite friend Adrian. Or, we can imagine it spoken by an awkward girl with glasses—a misfit in her family, too self-conscious to dance in public— who’s been far humiliated by the boy to whom she lost her virginity to come up with a clever response. Read the book a second time, and the latter interpretation becomes painfully apparent.

Akin to the nature of memory itself, Barnes’ prose renders these scenes as mere impressions rather than snapshots of a biography. Collectively, those impressions mesh to form something quite far from an objective lens. Nearly every paragraph in this book has multiple interpretations. Once all the questions are answered, the reader is left in the same state that Tony is in the book’s final pages—floored at life’s essential mysteries, and frustrated that they cannot be relived. Fortunately for us, we can just read the book again.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/booked/2012/03/29/booked-review-julian-barnes-the-sense-of-an-ending/feed/3The White Glove Mythhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/booked/2012/03/21/the-white-glove-myth/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/booked/2012/03/21/the-white-glove-myth/#commentsWed, 21 Mar 2012 13:39:02 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/booked/?p=6679“Don’t you need white gloves to handle that document?” a client asked recently when he visited our office. These vaunted protectors of our historical legacy, pieces of cloth that stand between our filthy hands and many American treasures, are ingrained in the mind as a required wear during a visit to an archive. Many reporters file stories replete with white glove imagery. It surfaces in movies and books. And this past week, sitting on my couch watching one of the many reality shows featuring celebrities, I was moved to write this. The scene took place in an institution, where a trained archivist carefully removed a centuries-old historical document from its resting place and gently handed it to the celebrity to examine. They both wore the requisite white gloves. Has this absurdity made its way that comfortably to the main stream?

Let’s begin with the main point: you do not need to wear white gloves to handle historical documents. If your hands are so dirty that they require gloves, go wash them. This will get rid of the excess oils on your hands that are the villain in this scenario. If your hands are wet, dry them.

But it’s not only that you do not need white gloves when handling old documents or book. You should not wear them. The problem with the white glove myth is that it fights against the very thing it is supposed to ensure – the safety of the historical treasure. Would you find it easier to read a book wearing white cloth gloves? It removes any dexterity required when handling older paper. You are more likely to rip the document or bend it while wearing gloves of any sort. Moreover, white gloves are more likely to sop up sweat and other oils that can then be transferred to the document. And the small fibers can be left behind and filed away with the document.

What started out as a form of show and presentation has moved into the collective consciousness as a required precaution when handling our national treasures. And it is counterproductive.

If only a document signed by Abraham Lincoln could tell you where it has been, what it has seen, for the last 150 years. Perhaps it has been held by other famous people, survived battles, sat decades in an attic, caught fire, traveled around the world, adorned the White House, or been torn apart and reassembled. We do not learn about these stories in history books. Our historical narrative is often ignorant of them.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “David Swan,” the hero sleeps by the side of the road as events swirl around him. He is tempted with love, nearly dies, and all the while slumbers, oblivious to it all. “We can,” wrote Hawthorne, “be but partially acquainted even with the events which actually influence our course through life, and our final destiny.”

Like David’s passage through events to which he is oblivious, the past exists around us and unfolds for us like a dream. But original documents have seen more. Their written words tell one story. But they live a full life of their own in the subsequent years, decades, centuries. We are looking for those stories. Put away your white gloves; there is no need here for chemical solutions or scientific laboratories. The process we are embarking on is more complex, subtle, and fascinating than this. And it will take us to the fields of Ohio in 1864.

The autograph sheet hid for a century bound into this book

A few months ago, a woman called us and claimed to have a single sheet of paper signed by President Lincoln‘s entire cabinet, the Team of Rivals. It was bound into a book, she said. Books of this era often carry printed signatures, and I was skeptical. But a digital scan she emailed showed signs of real ink on paper. The pens appeared in different colorations, which you would expect to see as the different Cabinet members pressed with varying force on paper. Printed signatures by contrast are uniform. Also, I could see where one stroke crossed another, an example of ink on paper showing texture and thickness. The signatures looked right, each bearing the clear script of the cabinet members.

Knowledge of history shed additional light. The Civil War was the early dawn of organized modern medical care. For the first time in coordinated fashion, non governmental organizations played a serious role alongside their governmental counterparts in public health, working to organize Sanitary Fairs to benefit wounded and disabled soldiers. President Lincoln and his cabinet took a personal interest in this, and occasionally donated autographs to be sold at these Sanitary Fairs. This donation has helped contribute to his legend. A few carried the full signatures of Lincoln and his cabinet, the “Team of Rivals,” and were signed on known letterhead. Only 3-4 of these documents are known to have survived. Though this sheet matched those few, there was no previous record of its existence.
But the document told us so much more. At the Sanitary Fair, it was bought by a man who bound it into a history book by Horace Greeley and entered his name on the front leaf: “E.N. Sill.” He was Elisha Sill, whose father had been a Revolutionary War hero and poet-preacher. The younger Sill was an abolitionist in Ohio, a state that, along with Massachusetts, led the anti-slavery crusade. In Summit County, where Sill ran the local bank, the fiery John Brown, who tried to liberate slaves, grew up. The families knew each other and John and Elisha were friends. Sill spoke in the Ohio Senate advocating abolition. And he fought for the well being of the soldiers going off to fight.

The book's owner signed his name, allowing us to track the document back 150 years

His name was a breadcrumb that took us to an obscure book, A Historical Sketch of the Soldiers Aid Society of Northern Ohio. He appears in the list of organizing members of the great Northern Ohio 1864 Sanitary Fair. Single admission tickets cost 25 cents. The fair, opened by Major General and future President James A. Garfield, brought in $78,000. The book describes the event in vivid detail. “February 22d, 1864, the anniversary of the birthday of Washington, and henceforth to be remembered as the inaugural day of the great Sanitary Fair, opened inauspiciously with clouds and rain. But by nine o clock the sun peered through the clouds, the sky cleared, the morning air was balmy and spring-like, and nature smiled in happiest mood. Above the fair building, around and in which the workers still clustered, thickly and busily as bees, floated the flag of the Union, and from housetops and flagstaffs throughout the city the stars and stripes were flung out. The streets were thronged with citizens and strangers.”

This book put us on the ground, in a tent, where soldiers and citizens strolled through the exhibits, seeking a glimpse of the heroes, and browsing the items being sold. More importantly, it put us in the shoes of E.N. Sill. The book continues, “Several fine engravings adorn the walls, autographs of Lincoln are for sale here, and useful and fancy goods of every variety.”

The Team of Rivals

One of these autographs, which had survived nearly 150 years, had just walked into our office. From Mr. Sill, it had gone to a judge in the Akron area, just miles from where it had been first sold in 1864. And when the judge’s grand daughter put the book and document on my desk, asking if she had a real signature of Abraham Lincoln, the document’s story came full circle, and was able to speak unhindered for the first time in a century.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/booked/2012/03/01/what-abraham-lincoln-never-knew/feed/0A Restoration That Earns Its ‘Wings’http://www.forbes.com/sites/booked/2012/02/03/a-restoration-that-earns-its-wings/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/booked/2012/02/03/a-restoration-that-earns-its-wings/#commentsFri, 03 Feb 2012 18:16:33 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/booked/?p=6619The most many people know about the film Wings is that it was the first winner of the Best Picture Oscar*. Given this unique accomplishment, it’s fair to assume that Wings occupies a vaunted place in American film history. But it has no real place in our film legacy.

William Wellman’s 1927 epic World War I aviation actioneer was pioneering. He strapped cameras onto the fronts of planes to get authentic shots of his stars careening through space. He even had his stars, Richard Arlen and Charles Rogers, pilot their planes themselves in the name of accuracy. (The film also stars original “It Girl” Clara Bow.) This approach revolutionized aerial cinematography and opened the door for innumerable war films that would have been impossible before Wings.

When it opened, it met with massive business. The film played for years as a first-run draw in New York. Audiences were attracted by the film’s blend of action, friendship, and romance, a well as a sound effects track at the dawn of the sound era and hand-tinted battle scenes that brought dogfights to fiery life. (The book The Man and His Wings, written by Wellman’s son William Wellman Jr. offers a thorough account of the making of Wings, from germ of an idea to groundbreaking shoot to gangbusters reception to the Academy Awards.)

Like many silent films, though, Wings was considered a disposable commodity, not a piece of art that required preserving. It languished in vaults where its original negative may have been destroyed in a fire. For decades it was near impossible to see in any form, and what did exist on VHS tapes and film prints was rough, with frames missing and source deterioriation cooked into the prints. Over time, Wings has been rendered a footnote in books about the Academy Awards, and its achievements have been all but forgotten.

But times have changed. More people are invested in our cinematic heritage, film restoration and preservation have become increasingly important, and studios have begun committing time and resources to protecting their legacies. Paramount Pictures joined this group in a big way by restoring and preserving Wings as the first act of its centennary celebrations.

Led by Andrea Kalas, Vice President of Archives at Paramount, the Wings restoration took 10 months and culminated in a beautiful Blu-Ray (and DVD) release of the film just in time for this year’s Academy Awards. More important, the restoration preserves Wings and allows us to talk about its place in American film history for the first time, well, ever.

Kalas and I spoke about Wings‘ legacy, as well as what went into restoring the film, on January 17, a week before the Blu-Ray hit shelves. An edited version of our conversation is below.

Forbes: How was it decided to restore Wings, and how long did the process take once that decision was made?

Andrea Kalas: Well, there were two real reasons why it really made a lot of sense to work on Wings. First and foremost, Paramount is celebrating its 100th year this year. So having a film like Wings in your back pocket is a great thing. And second of all, the technology has actually only recently evolved to be able to tackle the significant problems of the silent film.

The time that we spent was divided into two parts: the research time and the actual get-into-the-lab and do it time. The research time actually was longer because we really wanted to make sure that we had the best picture element that existed in the world. It’s very common with silent films that different archives all over the world will have different copies of films, and often you compare them, and sometimes you even combine them. So we worked closely with the Academy Film Archives, who reached out to all sorts of different people, [and] we reached out to people.

Then we also just looked at what documents still existed. We found an original continuity script, we found an original copy of the score, and we also researched a lot of periodicals of the day to research how the film was exhibited in 1927. We knew it had been a roadshow picture, as they called them, where in the big cities there would be full orchestras, sound effects, even some image effects with the projector — they were really making a big, blockbustery splash out of this film. So we wanted to read more specifically about that because that helped us approach the restoration.

Massimo Vitali’s latest large-scale photographs — of crowded beaches, cavernous ruins and all sorts of natural wonders — are some of the most beautiful landscape pictures ever taken. Yet there’s something surreal and sad about them too: Their epic size confronts you with the awesomeness of nature, but also with human vulnerability and mortality.

Take the tiny tourists in their neon-colored T-shirts and fanny packs, so cluelessly out-of-place in front of a majestic, crumbling columned ruin in Turkey. Or the swimmers laying out on a white rock formation in Sarakiniko. They’re funny, materialistic, impervious to the world, yet they’re oddly touching.

“I think no matter what people do, no matter what they try to do to nature or to monuments, humans are terribly small and terribly fragile compared to what is around us,” says the 67-year-old photographer.

Gossip. What does it do? Why do we love it? And do we need it? In Joseph Epstein’s latest book, Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit, he answers these questions in a tone that one would use in a dimly lit bar at the third or fourth drink. But of course, the topic is none other than gossip, and the book’s debaucheries spare no one.

Let’s say you’re like me: the tabloids at the grocery line don’t catch your eye and you’re genuinely uninterested in the size of Anthony Weiner’s text message history? Well, what if you heard that the President of Tunisia keeps a pet tiger in his palace? Or that Greece might possibly leave the Euro-zone? Or that your brother-in-law has too much lithium leftover at the end of the month?

Epstein argues that as much as gossip destructs, we often overlook its democratizing abilities to mobilize—or at least avert—disaster. Among the many, he calls out a few disguises that gossip often takes: character analysis, the modern sin, and, truest of all, the great achievement of humanity. If any of these comes as a shock or an exaggeration, well, what did you expect? It’s gossip.

Epstein joined me over email to talk about the subject of his book and why it might be misunderstood in today’s culture. An edited version of our conversation appears below.

Forbes: So what is untrivial about gossip? What are its unsung virtues?

Joseph Epstein: Two things: First, it can be crucial to your career or even your life. If you are working for a large corporation, for example, it would be worth your while to attend to gossip about the CEO showing signs of undergoing a nervous breakdown; or if you are in contention for a vice-presidency at the same corporation, it might be more than merely useful to know that another person in contention for the job happens to be sleeping with your boss.

Second, gossip is distinctly untrivial in that more and more of the news is gossip-laden: consider here only the recent DominqueStrass-Kahn and Herman Cain stories. Gossip has also played a larger and larger role in contemporary politics. At bottom, government leaks are little more than gossip gone political.

Joseph Epstein, the author (credit: Mike Fisher)

Based on the culture and generation we live in now, do you think gossip needs to be more shocking?

Not all gossip need be shocking, though shock can add a touch of piquancy to gossip. Nor is all gossip about what I think of as “sexcapades.” The best gossip has a strong touch of the amusing; it highlights the human foibles of vanity, pretensions, hypocrisy. The English have been rather better than we at telling gossip charmingly, though in their gutter press they also tell it more blatantly.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/booked/2011/12/19/gossip-a-conversation-with-novelist-joseph-epstein/feed/0Jewish Action Heroes: A Review of Neal Pollack’s ‘Jewball’http://www.forbes.com/sites/booked/2011/11/23/jewish-action-heroes-a-review-of-neal-pollacks-jewball/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/booked/2011/11/23/jewish-action-heroes-a-review-of-neal-pollacks-jewball/#commentsWed, 23 Nov 2011 21:37:18 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/booked/?p=6566In my recent interview with writer Neal Pollack, he called his first novel Jewball“the book I’ve always dreamed of writing.” And for Pollack, a writer most known for satirical memoir, those dreams of an action-packed, historical fiction with noir undertones, featuring Nazi-fighting Jewish basketball players, seem like they’ve been a long time coming.

Several of Pollack’s previous books, such as Never Mind the Pollacks, Alternadad, and Stretch, feature stylized versions of the author as their main characters, following real events with a veracity hovering somewhere between memoir and creative non-fiction. Given Pollack’s body of work, perhaps it makes sense that Jewball would take historical events as its narrative baseline. Yet Jewball is also a book that relishes in genre fantasy. Even though Pollack ostensibly transitions from quasi-memoir to quasi-historical fiction, he approaches his narrative with the enthusiasm of a writer who has been longing to break free from the strictures of reality.

Yes, the story of Jewball is tethered to real events transpiring just before WWII. Yes, most of the characters are based on real people, some of whom are known historical figures. But even putting aside the fact that pre-war America is one of the richest settings of the modern era, in terms of potential for rich narrative, this bookjust feels more like fantasy than historical fiction. It is to basketball what Raiders of the Lost Ark is to archaeology. Pollack comes at his readers with both genre barrels blazing, combining the experience of an expert nonfiction writer and the enthusiasm of a first-time novelist.

In terms of genre conceit, Jewball has just about everything. We see action, romance, comedy, revenge, damnable villains, and a heroic (though complicated) central character. The story follows a group of Jewish basketball players during the 1930s, whose coach incurs a sizable debt to the American wing of the Nazi party, otherwise known as the German-American Bund. There are long sequences of sports heroics within an archaic, though exciting brand of professional basketball. There is a laconic, world-weary protagonist in the person of Inky Lautner, whose negotiation of his urban underworld works as a sort of noir bildungsroman. There are ethnically motivated brawls between Jews and Nazis, and heaping spoonfuls of comic relief.

In my recent interview with Pollack, he described his book as “a Sabbath stewpot” of all his favorite things, basketball, kick-ass Jews, and noir fiction. But there are good stews and bad stews. This one works, because the ingredients have a common base—a fictional treatment of historical underdogs that is equal parts sympathy and empowerment, with a splash of knowing satire. Pollack’s basketball-playing Jews are oppressed by Nazis, superior athletes, and sometimes even each other. They’re sympathetic, but they also don’t want your sympathy, and are certainly not the typical picture of oppression seen in films. In a word, these Jews are tough. And in the midst of their take-no-prisoners attitude toward those who would deny their right to existence, one can also find a few satirical nods to tried and true archetypes of Jewish identity and tradition.

Take the book’s opening passage. We’re at a South Philadelphia Hebrew Association basketball game. Pollack writes, “The folks in the crowd had suffered the requisite tight-quartered Shabbat with their toothless Bubbes… But now it’s Saturday night. These grandchildren victims of post-shtetl nostalgia needed to cut loose in so many ways… [to belong] to something bigger and sweatier than themselves.” Point-guard Inky Lautman is at the free throw line, but he’s less worried about sinking his shots than a bevy of Bundsman who are leering at him from the stands, “silently sipping rye from little silver flasks with swastikas on the sides.”

Inky calls a time-out and on the sidelines erases the game play from the coach’s chalkboard to set up a different defense against the Bund, one that involves a box-out by his team’s “plodding behemoth rebounder,” who also happens to be a concert violinist, and a diversion by the team band, which breaks into a Duke Ellington number. A bloody free-for-all ensues, one of several we see before novel’s end.

Pollack’s first novelis the literary version of a great action movie crossed with a sports-themed “underdog makes good” flick, with enough comedy and noir intrigue to make the lulls between fight scenes worthwhile. In short, Jewball is good fun and highly recommended to anyone who likes basketball, noir, Nazi-fighting Jews, not to mention good fiction-writing, or any combination of the above.

During the 1980s, a new breed of surfer — brash, flamboyant and blasting the B-52s — invaded a tiny stretch of Newport Beach, Calif., christened it Echo Beach, and changed surf culture forever. These pompadoured punks upended the anti-corporate, laidback attitude of ’70s California with their polka-dotted surfboards, Day-Glo tank tops and neon Wayfarers, gaining the attention of surf magazines, photographers and fashion brands with their outsized personalities and wacky outfits. And though their reign was brief, Echo’s athletes, entrepreneurs and board-makers would go on to influence street style, design and professional surfing throughout the ’90s and ‘aughts.

Mike Moir, a Canadian photographer who had lived in Southern California since the 1940s, captured this dynamic subculture with his snapshots both in the water and on the boardwalk. His dynamic, giddy photos are the subject of a new coffee-table book, The Eighties at Echo Beach, published by Chronicle with an introduction by journalist Jamie Brisick. The book is a delight — and not just because of the gleefully loud ’80s fashions. Moir’s photos, as well Brisick’s words, pulse with teenage rebellion and attitude, celebrating the innocent hedonism of youth that transcends time and place.